Being a rope bunny is attention squared.
One day Jae and I were bored on shift while working at the dungeon, sitting around in full makeup and half-dressed waiting for clients. They suggested we do a rope suspension to keep us amused and yes, the odds that someone would walk in for an impromptu session when I was an hour-deep into shibari knots was REAL, but I didn’t mind. I’d untangle that issue if I came to it.
Jae tied the twisted jute like they were holding back the rope from gobbling me up. They gripped me in their strong arms while the ropetails flailed, like they were protecting me, pressing their chest into my back so I could feel them as a wall, a base. Keeping me grounded, even hoisted, swinging from the rig in the ceiling. They were the roots as I swung from their branch.
Bondage is sometimes like a hug, like being held tight between the bite of rope or leather. Jae moved fast, winding rope around my limbs, collecting them together, and catching the jute here, then here, then here in quick knots. The other women on shift sat along the bench, arms hooked over the bars, watching. Their regard upon me was not unlike being held, too.
Jae took me up fast. A pile of tied limbs on the floor, they hauled me off the ground, winding the winch and I felt the tug tug tug lift as it took my weight. The shape Jae made with rope and my body took form as I went from twisted on the floor to full flight.
They stepped back and pondered their work. The rope joining my legs let them move up and down by sliding through a loop, one leg towards the back of my head.
Someone said, ‘wow!’ and that dopamine rush hit me, so I moved into another position, pushing one leg forward and the other back, until I was in a split and everyone went – ‘oooooh’ and I liked that too. I stayed up until one of my hands began to tingle. We weren’t interrupted by any errant customers at the door, no one to send everyone scattering for their corsets and PVC, to leave me stranded in a spiderweb of jute.
Attention-seeking is the stuff of primary school report cards. It’s the conceit of intolerable children, look at me look at me look at me. When you’re a teenage girl and a young woman it is often pathologized. It is slipped in amongst any other symptoms and shaped into diagnoses that are somehow always personality disorders.
BPD babes seek attention. Narcissists crave the spotlight. I worry I am a narcissist, but a friend reassured me that if I was so worried, it was unlikely I was a narcissist because a narcissist probably wouldn't care. Then I worry that I'm some kind of special narcissist, who does worry, but then is anyway. THEN I’m like, ‘you’re a special kind of narcissist? You are such a fucking narcissist.’
I want attention, yes. That’s part of why I did sex work. It felt like a healthy, harmless and not completely insufferable way to seek the spotlight. Except the spotlight was the soft glowing lamp in a massage parlour, a dimmable downlight in a dungeon with an audience of one. There’s a limit to the attention I want to receive. Like, I want enough to know that I exist, but not enough that I get trolled online.
Attention is actually being seen. We need it to know we are cared about and understood. I need it to know that I am real, because the reality of my skin and bones isn’t enough. Do I only exist in the sightlines of other people? Maybe. I feel insubstantial otherwise, milky and transparent like tracing paper. A ghost in the corner of other people’s eyes.
I felt insubstantial for two years. You know which two years. Yes, I was in Naarm/Melbourne for the lockdowns. Yes, it was 262 days. Yes, I have said, in earnest, to an actual other human being, ‘you wouldn’t understand if you weren’t here.’ I am that insufferable. It was insufferable.
During the first manic months of lockdown number one, I barely slept and posted all my thoughts on twitter. I was pretty sure the world was ending. I was wild and giddy and so, so manic, and this dude writer dropped into my DMs. He just wanted to let me know that he thought I should keep my meltdown offline. It didn't look good, professionally. For my brand.
It wasn't that I didn't know I was doing it. I did. But I couldn't stop. And I knew people were looking, but now I had been SEEN, which felt different somehow. More. I was stripped bare and strung up, but not in the fun way, not in the ways I enjoy, and no one was impressed by my flying form or my tricky skills. They were Concerned. They wanted me to know they Cared.
I immediately deleted my twitter account, needing to disappear, be Unseen. Unfortunately that account was somewhat instrumental to maintaining my career. I'm not known for my forethought or the soundness of my ideas.
There are lots of ways to be a creative and have a career. You don't NEED a brand, but if you want to make any kind of money from your art, you mostly do. Most marketing advice for creatives in this year of our lord 2023, is to 'be your own brand!' You don't just sell your books, you have to sell yourself, and you have to do it on social media because that is where such sales take place. Court attention, seek it, chase it.
It’s just that a cult of personality doesn't gel so great with a personality disorder. Of course, people want you to be yourself!
...just not like that.
A lot of creatives lean into mental illness rep, but there's still this boundary between what is acceptable public mental illness and what is not. Mania is scary when you're watching it from the outside (and from the inside too), and so is paranoia and delusions and psychosis.
I'm sorry, but it seems like someone might be a little TOO mentally ill.
Keep it like a secret and maintain your social media chill. Think of your brand. Think of your follower count. I’m incapable of this. The first symptom of my hypomanic episodes is the habit of posting all my thoughts to my socials, which is why I deleted them. I couldn’t bear for anyone to see the parts of myself I’d plastered there. I needed to burn down all the things I’d written that laid me out, a DIY Y-incision, my guts spilling out onto the timeline.
Keep it offline, sweetheart. It’s not good for your brand. You’re going to attract unwanted attention.
When I started doing sex work in 2001, the vibe was total anonymity. You put an ad in the paper, text description only. You showed up to the shift at the massage parlour or the dungeon and the only promotion was the receptionist reading your fake name in a spiel of fake names when a client called. Maybe someone asked, ‘oh, who’s Mia, what’s she like?’ and the receptionist would say, ‘oh, she’s a doll, Steve. Nineteen, slender, dark hair. Provides a great service!’
Four truths and a lie.
To expand your customer base and compete with the hordes of workers all out for the finite client bucks, contemporary whores have to have a social media presence. There’s no escape. They gotta slap that big red ‘A’ front and centre of their puritan smock, just below their shit-eating grin, and snap a selfie to upload with a #availablenow.
It’s a volatile kind of attention environment. I needed to drum up business without conjuring trolls and advertise myself as a sexy fucking bitch, while skirting Meta’s infamous ‘anti-solicitation’ policies. It’s glaringly obvious just how much some people and some platforms hate whores. Meta removed my posts for policy violations and threatened to shut down my profile. Men dropped into my DMs to inform me that I’m an abomination, just in case I didn’t know.
What is it with dudes and unwanted DMs? Can you imagine having the audacity? The fucking cheek? It’s almost like they want attention or something.
I often took exhibitionism sessions at the dungeon because I got to show off for $3.50 a minute. It’s bizarre to think back on, because now I have a lot of days where no amount of money would be enough to convince me to walk to the end of the driveway and take out the bins.
Anyway, Pete would book me now and then for submissive sessions. He liked to tie you up and show you off. Clip some clamps to your nipples or labia, attach a leash, walk you down the hallway with your hands tied up tight behind your back. You know, that kind of thing. He’d pull you gently down to the office and show the manager how he attached the clamps to your tits or some new knot behind your back that you couldn’t see and they’d make a fuss about how pretty you were, then tug tug tug, back up the hallway you’d go.
One time Pete tied me to a cargo crate on my back, nude, legs splayed ultra-wide. The plastic ridges of the crate dug into my skin, making me shift minutely on and off the pokingest parts, trying to relieve the pain and find a comfortable spot but there were none. All I could think of is how exposed I was, legs bent, open and tied. Attention cubed, like Pete knew exactly how much external focus was enough for me and then he pushed me just past it.
Oh, I definitely knew I existed, the burning shame at my splayed pussy, the dig of the crate into my skin screamed with every movement, every sensation is times ten, times a hundred. It was the kind of vulnerability that made me feel squished between two slides under a microscope, like a lone zit waiting to get squeezed.
Is this what you wanted? All eyes on you? Have it, then. Eat it alllll up.
After so much isolation in lockdowns 1-6, all that time with ourselves to think and ponder and ruminate and obsess, I'm sure a lot of people asked themselves, ‘who am I when no one is looking?’
Instead, I was asking, ‘am I when no one is looking?’
I used to think I was an introverted extrovert, but I’m not. I’m an introverted exhibitionist. What’s the difference? Mostly shame, I think. The desire for attention is in a forever war with my natural isolationist tendencies. It’s a hectic balancing act, like watching someone walking a slackline and wincing as they lose balance, find it, lose it again.
In 2020 et al I didn’t have to toe that line. When we weren’t allowed to go anywhere or see anyone as dictated by law, the choice was made for me. I locked the door and closed the curtains, and this was probably for the best, because I spent most of my time in a benzo haze on the couch or pacing around my house, weeping gently, and no one wants to see that.
I ached to wear a pretty dress and tell a raucous and almost-inappropriate story to a group of people holding wine glasses, and to eat up their laughter like brightly wrapped bon-bons. I needed to prance in and out of dungeon waiting rooms in 6-inch heels, greeting clients in my fetish splendour. I wanted all eyes on me, to feel seen and solid and real, not made of Xanax and mist.
With every rumour about restrictions easing, I crossed my fingers that we'd come out of lockdown so I could get the exact amount of attention I need to know that I exist. But then we’d go back in, and I would draw the shades and fade and fade.
Now I don’t know if I’ll ever return to technicolour, or if I even want to. Or if I even can.
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